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Biographical Information
editMy name is Daniel and I am a graduate student located in California. Throughout my adulthood I have traveled in Western Europe, Asia, and Oceania. To date my favorite place on the globe is New Zealand, the land of the kiwi and the tuatara. Japan ranks as a close second.
My primary language is English and unfortunately, like most Americans, I have only an elementary understanding of another language. In my case it is Español, which is beautiful but not that useful given my scholarly focus (French or German would be more practical).
Scholarly Background
edit- As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley I trained in Sociology with an emphasis in feminist theory. Given the chaotic politics that often inform disciplinary boundaries, my department housed some important psychoanalytic theorists, so I was heavily influenced in that direction.
- As such, I graduated with a B.A. in Sociology and a minor in Women's Studies (2001). I spent a year during my undergraduate work at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
- After completing my undergraduate training I earned an M.A. in Rhetoric and Composition Theory.
- Currently I am pursuing a doctorate at the University of California, Davis in the Cultural Studies Graduate Group.
- My current projects focus on information technology, posthumanism, subject formation, gender performativity in cyberspace, and theories drawn from Science and Technology Studies. Underlying all of this is a concern for the classic subject/object headache and the diverse ontological and epistemological repercussions that this split occasions.
- I have found it necessary to compartmentalize the academic and religious facets of my life.
Wikipedia and my Scholarship
editIn my capacity as a teaching associate at California State University, Fresno and an adjunct faculty member at Fresno City College I have incorporated wikis and Wikipedia into my curriculum. The results have been very interesting and I have found several ways that Wikipedia both complements and complicates the established pedagogical assumptions that underwrite much of the scholarship in Composition and Rhetoric. The potential for collaborative learning alone is fantastic. Moreover, the dynamic mode of authorship in Wikipedia, coupled with the archiving and talk pages means that students are able to refine their argumentative and critical thinking skills in a way that is reminscent of what John Trimbur has called "dissensus."
As a scholar I have written articles on wikis and Wikipedia, one of which is being published in the forthcoming anthology The Wild, Wild Wiki: Unsettling the Frontiers of Cyberspace. Moreover, I will be presenting a fifteen minute paper at the 2006 Wikimania conference in Cambridge, Mass. as well as a five minute "lightening presentation" at the same event.
Contributions to Wikipedia
editAt this point I have not officially authored a page from the ground up. There are a few topics that I would like to take on, but I haven't had the disposible time to do so. I have also found it somewhat difficult to make the methodological leap from my academic style to that favored by Wikipedia. That, by the way, has nothing to do with the quality of Wikipedia, nor is it an elitist statement favoring the erudite conventions of academia. Rather, I have found it hard to wrap my head around the NPOV and the exhortation to not advance original research. Being a rhetorician, attaining that level of non-normative discourse seems optimistic.
I have, however, in various capacities edited a number of articles including:
Moreover, I have begun creating and editing pages relating to Disability Studies:
I am exercising purposeful restraint with my participation, because I can see how contributing to Wikipedia can quickly move down the slippery slope from casual hobby to incapacitating addiction.